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"Some" is an understatement and "unix-like" is kind of funny. There were several strains of unix available when OS/2 was released in 1985.

System V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_5

BSD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD

SunOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS

Xenix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix (which was created by the eventually infamous Santa Cruz Operation - SCO - and licensed by Microsoft)

Also VMS qualifies as a fully memory-protected, preemptive OS: The real innovation that Windows and OS/2 did was to take fully preemptive OSes and put them in marginal hardware (at the time) like PCs.



Xenix wasn't created by SCO, it was developed by Microsoft (initially for the PDP-11) and was based on licensed AT&T Bell Labs code (and some BSD).

SCO ported Xenix to a few processors for Microsoft starting with 8086/8088. It wasn't until 1987 that SCO ownership of Xenix.


You are correct, but I was referring to desktops, and the particular example is Coherent from Mark Williams Company which was demonstrated running on an IBM PC at the National Computer Conference show in Houston in 1983. Minix came in 1987, if I recall correctly.


There was also Minix at around that time (late '80s/early '90s).




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